If people still want to run Mac OS 9, they can. There's nothing that says that they can't use the machine on which it's installed.

When Apple changes the machines so it can't run anymore, most everyone who wants to migrate will probably have migrated to Mac OS X anyway.

Hopefully, fewer than three years after that Quark will be done too.

It costs money to support each operating system. Since Mac OS X is clearly the future, why support the past beyond a certain point? They're keeping the Classic environment in Mac OS X and that should be enough. If the developers did their job, the software should run decently.

Originally posted by mac15 apple would be turning .mac into .NET with all this integration buisnees.

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I'd be very careful what you say here. .mac and.Net are 2 entirely different concepts from my understanding.

.mac appears to be a really good way of encouraging none computer literate users to share information. In a very basic view I see it as a nice form of web publishing where the pain of designing webpages and uploading is all hidden away from the user. Please correct me on this if I'm wrong!

.NET is a very good (but with a quite a few holes to iron out) way of providing web services. Now the simple way I would describe a web service would be a calculator. Say I wanted to add some numbers together, rather than use my machine I call a "web service" to do this for me. If you scale this up you have a powerful framework where your computer really becomes a place for calling lots of remote services and combining them to make something more powerful. Of course this is just a simple view of it though.

In fairness Microsoft have had huge marketing issues with this .NET and have been tagging everything as .NET this and .NET which have nothing to do with this core concept.

What Apple have with .mac appears to be a really good idea esp for those who don't have the skills to host these things properly. Anyway this isn't a dig at you but I just want to make sure that the ideas arn't confused.

Or yeah whatever anyone thinks .NET is actually a really good idea and is probably the best offering of the "web services" out there but that's just my opinion.

Sorry one other thing, you say why not do it the old way? If you follow one of Apple's main objectives; to make computers easy to use and accessible to everyone, then you need to consider your entire user base, something which most developers are really poor at doing.

One nice advantage of this integration is that the stuff people put online will be easy to access and find (most novices tend not to have good HCI prinicples when designing).

Personally I think its a good idea and it doesn't restrict you from doing things "the old way". I just opens up doors for people without the technical knowledge which surely can't be a bad thing? Just think how complicated it can be to setup a streaming server for movies. Imagine click one button to publish your content on the web and all that nasty work is done for you hosted in a good environment. Now that's what's I call ease of use.

Apple is not preventing you from accessing Classic they are simply saying that on future machines you will not be able to boot classic OS9 alone. This is not a huge issue for the majority of Mac users but some users who have SW or HW that hasn't been updated will have to wait or get to harrassing the developers to get with the program.

.mac and some iApps like iSync and iCal have special features but the majority of the apps function just fine. Let's leave the paranoia to John Nash "k"

Originally posted by mnkeybsness you can still buy "classic" imacs from the apple store as low as $799 with your choice of os 9 or os x...

...but i agree...it's kind of like...why doesn't winblowz xp run off of DOS anymore?

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Uh, it technically does have a 'DOS Command Prompt,' but it is no way the MS-DOS we know from Windows 9x. It's the NT command prompt, which in turn uses the NT kernel.

Windows NT has existed since 1993. Mac OS X's roots started later but was never intended to actually merge into Mac OS X. Windows XP is an evolutionary OS and has already undertaken 10 years of 9x compatibility. It doesn't need a classic mode except for some albeit very few bitchy apps

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